North Korea's loony regime of Kim Jong-un conducted a successful missile launch test – landing about 60 miles south of the Russian city of Vladivostok, according to some reports – marking a frightening nuclear escalation that has heightened tensions across the planet.
That this first serious confrontation in ages is happening now is ironic, given that a little-reported showdown about the use of nuclear power will soon take place in the U.N.
A draft of a U.N. treaty to ban all nuclear weapons is about to be voted on. It has the support of 132 nations and is very likely to pass, at which point the United States will soon once again be in technical violation of a major international agreement, as it long has been with regard to the International Treaty banning land mines.
While practically the ban may not accomplish much, it matters a little when we violate treaties, at least intellectually speaking. North Korea's violation of similar international agreements is at the crux of the international consensus against allowing the country to have a nuclear program in the first place.
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The calculus for small countries like North Korea is not hard to understand. On the one hand, they see the nuclear powers not moving toward disarmament as planned. On the other, they see countries like the United States routinely sweeping into countries like Libya and Iraq – who either abandoned or never started nuke defense programs – to pursue "regime change" policies.
As such, many smaller countries may feel like developing nukes is the only way to ensure their sovereignty. This pushes us into situations like this mess with North Korea.
Complicating the problem in North Korea is that the United States has long taken the position that it will not sit down at the negotiating table with the North Koreans until they pledge to disarm. But the situation is so severe now that the only way to get something done might be to dial down the macho, drop the preconditions and agree to sit at the table with the man John McCain calls the "crazy fat kid," Kim Jong-un. The chances of that sort of move coming out of this White House don't seem high
